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The Changing Communications Industry
Thirty years ago, 85-90 percent of the workers who belonged to the
Communication Workers of America were in the telecommunications
industry, with the vast majority working for only a handful of giant
enterprises. Today, 60 percent of the union's members are in telecommunications
or related fields, but they work for more than 1,200 employers.
Employers
need
workers who have
the training to do the
job and do it well.
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Despite a history of dealing with technological change
in the telephone industry, CWA and other unions in the sector were
scarcely prepared for the dramatic changes that have taken place
since the court-ordered breakup of AT&T in the early-1980s.
Downsizing has become commonplace in telecommunications, as new
and old companies rushed to garner favor with the stock market by
slashing workforces - often regardless of whether the cuts made
sense. Consequently, tens of thousands of union members lost their
jobs. The job security arrangements that the union had worked to
implement with individual companies were of limited effectiveness
in the face of this onslaught.
 As
the telecommunications industry reshaped itself, one of the first
things to go was training. The commitment to building long-term
skills and cross training that had characterized much of the industry
in the past were largely gone. The new company approach was to train
"just enough" to master a specific task or handle a particular
product. But when the tasks or products change, much of that kind
of "training" turns out to be worthless.
Needed:
Good Training and Portable Skills
Two issues that do resonate well
with high tech workers are good training and the portability
of skills. It is easy to understand the lure of training at
a time when the introduction of new equipment or software can
literally make one's job obsolete in a few weeks. Likewise,
in an industry with little security, the ability to develop
skills and credentials that you can take with you is an important
incentive.
Employers, too, have needs that unions can help address. These
include the same issues of training and portability that motivate
workers, as well as problems with recruitment, workforce stability,
management, loyalty, and job quality.
Employers need workers who have the training to do the job and
do it well. At the same time, they are generally unwilling to
make large investments to get that training. They are also often
reluctant to make the kind of long-term commitments that are
usually necessary to ensure worker loyalty and reliability. |
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